In between my last posting on here and now, I’ve been scouring the continent of North America, on a trip three years in the making, and now after leaving all of the xenophobia, oppression and racism of the Land of the Free behind, I come back to find that football is embroiled in yet another race row; this time with the head of the footballing governance and all around bumbling idiot Sepp Blatter in the middle of the whole thing.
The root cause of this whole debacle stems from two incidents of racism that have been brought to light – but not yet found guilty – from our own Barclays Premier League; John Terry and Luis Suarez allegedly using racial slurs towards Anton Ferdinand and Patrice Evra respectively. The evidence with the John Terry case has a certain focal point, in that there is video footage of Terry uttering the alleged slur, caught by Sky Sports ever-present cameras.
The Suarez incident, whilst lacking solid evidence of the abuse occurring, still is unacceptable in today’s game if it has happened, and if evidence is found to prove both men guilty, then they should be handed hefty fines and bans from the game for a long enough amount of time to set an example to the rest of the Premier League. No matter if one of the accused is England captain, the Kick It Out campaign has worked tirelessly over the last fifteen years to eradicate the problem from our game and any example of it happening now should be met with the most severe of punishments. We in England are a constantly progressing nation; a multi-cultural melting pot of different races and people, and our game should be representative of this, not falling back into an archaic state in which so many other footballing nations seem to be stuck in.
We’re certainly don’t have the problems that the Spanish seem to have when it comes to racism; Samuel Eto’o was infamously subject to racial abuse from Real Zaragoza fans when playing for Barcelona and was so incensed that he had to be convinced to return to the field of play. Our own black international players have too been subjected to monkey chants when playing the Spaniards back in 2004.
We’ve come a long way and worked extremely hard since the narrow-minded skinhead hooliganism of the 80’s, and with so many big sporting events coming to our shores in the near future in the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games and the Rugby World cup, we simply cannot afford to have our reputation as a culturally progressive nation jeopardized by a few select idiots who ruin it for everyone else.
In a stark contrast to our status as a progressing nation, the head of Football’s governing body FIFA has once again proven that his view on football is firmly stuck in the archaic region. His suggestion that racial abuse can be remedied with a handshake at the end of the game is nothing short of ludicrous; even looking at the fact that he probably meant that players have a tendency to say things in the heat of the moment during a match doesn’t allow him to escape the fact that his views on the modern game are plain idiocy.
This is the same Sepp Blatter who suggested that women football players should wear tighter shorts in order to make the game “more appealing” to the wider audience, the same Sepp Blatter who handed the World Cup – the most prestigious sporting competition on the planet – to the world renowned footballing nations of Russia and Qatar for 2018 and 2022.
Whilst the awarding to Russia is mildly acceptable, being that Russian football is fairly (although still not widely) well known, the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar – a country that boasts fifty degree summers, and a grand total of zero football stadiums at the time of awarding – shows that Blatter’s organisation has no interest in what is best for football, only to make the quickest dollar (and to cause more controversy by suggesting homosexual men not attend the competition, owing to the fact that homosexuality is banned in the country).